


Feathered Stone

by fullfeature



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: ...issues, Bill has supernatural powers, Dream Sharing, F/M, M/M, Multi, Pining, Sexual Content, Soulmates, Stan has, Supernatural Elements, did someone say angst, mention of Beverly's asshole dad, warning for the bowers gang? I guess?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-19
Updated: 2018-01-10
Packaged: 2019-02-04 06:57:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12765585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fullfeature/pseuds/fullfeature
Summary: Bill does not understand why the boy in his dreams cries so often, but he is determined to find Stanley and solve the problem.





	1. Heavy Heart

**Author's Note:**

> not explicitly expressed in this chapter but Stan is a senior in college and therefore over the age of 18, as is Bill.

Stanley Uris dreams of lips and hands and skin, bare and warm and casted in glows of gold. Puffy pink lips with bite marks, freckle framed eyes and scabbed over palms. He dreams of bird feather pillows and silk sheets, heated touches and wet mouths with sensual missions. Wet tongues lingering across his skin, a puff of hot breath on his inner thigh. He dreams of husky voices, rough gasps, raspy pleas. Morning birdsongs muffled by the noise of their skin and mouths sliding together. Lattice windows without curtains, yellow sheets and sometimes there are stuffed animals on the bed for him to sink his cries into. Other times his tongue runs over calloused fingers as he sucks to keep his voice muffled from the outside. Sometimes there is music, soft beat tunes or old scratching records. Sometimes the bedsheets are blue and the windows are covered in blue curtains that stifle the sun. He does not know why. The dreams do not explain themselves. They just happen. Stan feels as if they are out of his control, but they are his dreams, nonetheless.      


Tonight they are in the yellow sunlit room. He is in these dreams too, but rarely in focus. Instead of seeing himself he lives as himself. It is this other--their swirling eyes and pearly teeth, that the dream centers around. Taller, broader, stronger, stable. There is the soft ghost of fingers on his calves, running up his thighs and skimming across his hipbones, this other laughs--low and teasing.The laugh of a man. He stops rouletting images and becomes a person. He almost always looks the same. Sometimes his hair is shorn, but today it curls at is forehead and around his ears. His lips are thin, his eyes are so very blue. His hands are warm. _Stanley_ , he says, _Baby you’re so responsive._ And Stan knows this is a dream, but it is a dream real enough to make his heart flutter all the same, the swooping in his stomach amplified by the dry kisses on his jaw.  


The other man places a large palm on his sternum and smiles slow like molasses, _I love the way you look right now,_ he says. Stan’s thighs spasm at the praise, and he can’t keep his own flushing skin from betraying him. He goes pink all across his body from his cheeks to his kneecaps where he is slowly bent in half. The palm lingers, tracing gentle patterns across his ribs and the backs of his thighs. The muscles jump because he is ticklish but the other knows this. The other has always known the ins and outs of him, like they are one and the same. Their hands tangle together as they kiss, soft and sweet. There is no god in the world Stanley would wake up for right now. Sometimes they stop here and simply kiss, basking in the sunlight until Stan wakes up. Sometimes the other speaks of himself in details that Stan forgets when he wakes. This is not one of those times.  


_I can’t control myself around you,_ he says, _can’t stop touching you._ The man fits himself tighter between Stan’s thighs, arousal pressing into his thigh, and Stan pulses with want. He leans back over so they are nose to nose and presses their lips together, gentle. His hands, which sometimes are covered in rough dried paint, are smooth as they rub across this dip of Stan’s spine and grasp at his ass. Their tongues meet in a slow slide as the man gives him a firm squeeze and Stan can feel the keen in the back of his throat. He tries to swallow it down, but the other knows.  


_I wanna hear you,_ he says. So Stan clenches his eyes shut and lets the high pitched noise float from his mouth. His hands are curled into the sheets and even in his dreams he is afraid to touch, too scared to do something wrong. Instead he lets the man kiss along his jaw and suck gentle marks into his skin. He lets his noises loose, whining when the man presses his teeth into the skin at his too sharp collarbone. The man laughs again, but it is not mean, it is stirring. Stanley hitches his legs around the other’s back, letting their smooth skin glide across one another's, feeling the sun give them it’s blessing. The man leans further down to kiss his chest, knowing, without Stan having to say anything, that if he runs his tongue across Stan’s peaked nipple that his back will arch as he lets out the loudest whine yet.  


So the other does and laughs that laugh again. _I love when you moan for me,_ he says, _love all your sensitive spots._ The sun catches the side of Stan’s knee as the other spreads his legs so he can slide down Stan’s body. Mouth to Stan’s hip the man sucks another mark. _I love how submissive you are,_ he says. And Stan is still ashamed, even in his dream, that he wants so much to be pressed into the sheets and called a good little boy. He does not say this but the air shifts because the other knows. Instead of teasing the hands are purposeful, firm and a smidge rough where they grab his thighs and waist. _You don’t need to be ashamed with me,_ the other says, _you never need to be ashamed, Sweetheart. I’m going to give you all you need._ And Stan can feel the want rise in him again, but the tears rise too. The man wipes them away, gentle again before thumbing Stan’s nipples and skimming down to grip his waist.  


_I love you_ , the other says, voice deep and rich and so sincere. _I love you, Stan._ His eyes are so blue, and Stan cannot meet them for more than a second. Stan cannot help the hitching sob in his breath either, the way he curls into himself and covers his eyes. _Sweetheart, I mean it, I do._ The man tries to pull his arms away from his face but **No,** Stan thinks, **No, I can’t. I can’t.** And so the man pulls away without another word, leaving the sun soaked sheets cold and bare and Stan’s dream skin prickling with goosebumps. There is the angry call of a crow and  


Stanley wakes up in his bed alone, the other’s voice and touch fading leaving a cavern of empty space in his chest, a chill on the inside of his thighs. He turns his face into his pillow and is not surprised to feel the wet of his tears there, opening his mouth to bite the fabric against a scream. Some people were not meant to be loved. No, some people were meant to hide the compartments of themselves away, packed and pristine. Some people are meant to watch through veiled eyes as all of their friends fall in love and they are left behind. Some people are stitched too tight at the seams, stuffed to full of their own cotton problems to ever fit anyone else inside.    


Some people are meant to hold every bit of themselves behind lock and key, dolling out only necessary information. Some people learn the hard way that they are too much, too complicated, too complex, and that nobody will want to bear a burden that heavy.    
  
So Stan turns over again and prays to whatever deity may listen that these dreams will go away. They always leave him pining for someone that doesn’t exist: someone who will look into the cracks of him and still want to stay around. _Sweetheart,_ the voice in his head rings and Stan fights another wave of tears, begging silently for it to stop. How many months can he go on, being loved in little hours by a ghost. How many months until he fills with too much cotton self loathing and rips his own stitching.


	2. Memories Weight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> some billverly bff action and some backstory wooo

Bill jolts awake, gasping for a second or so. The melds always leave him like this at first, but it only takes a minute for him to groan, long and loud. He plops back down into his mass of pillows and lets out a curse. His arousal has subsided, but it is both a blessing and a curse. Without it all he can think about is how Stan had looked, soft dream edges, watery eyes as he cried. It had not been the first time, but Bill is always shaken by how much he can feel in their melded dreams, like he’s got another set of veins, running emotions and impulses and thoughts through his system. Other melds give him sensory experiences, sure, but they are dulled. Bill can tell the sensations are from somewhere else. With Stanley, who he’d met in his own mind and found through sheer force of will, it is like they share one being, feeling and breathing in tandem. He can still remember the first time he’d opened his eyes in Stan’s dream earlier that year:  
  


God, the way Stan had looked. Laid out in the light of the sun, birds singing sweet melodies outside the large window. It had reminded Bill of Snow White, the way his lips had parted, how pink they were. The halo his curls had casted around his face, the tan of his skin against yellow sheets. Their melds always had an atmosphere to them, soft, gentle. Like a vintage polaroid, a thrifted sweater, rain on a sunny day. Bill was no poet but he could write stanzas on the way Stan made him feel.   
  


He could write sonnets on the first time they locked eyes. He’d felt… he’d felt  _ confusedscaredhappysadbashfulnervous _ \--  
  


“Bill!” Beverly shakes his shoulder, her face scrunching as she touches his now cold sweat. “Bill, I could hear you groan all the way out in the living room, are you okay?” She wipes her hand on his sheets, sitting down. Her eyes are stark blue, soft with their concern.   
  


“I’m f-fuh-fine,” he says. “I just…” He looks at her, really looks at her. Her freckles, the small scar on her cheek, and sighs. “I f-fucked it up, with Stan. He cr-cried tonight, when I…” He trails off, eyes leaving hers and looking at his hands. He always thought that they would come together easily, if they were soulmates. That if it really was some sort of cosmic meant-to-be then it--they--would be simple. He would say  _ I’m your soulmate, Stanley. I looked into the stars in me and I saw your name written in the dusts of Venus and our future laid out in Milky Way, and… and…  _ Bill groans again. Even if it is the truth it sounds awful. Contrived.   
  


Beverly is staring at him with a blank look. “I really wish you would finish your thoughts before you go in your own head. You said he cries all the time, what did you do wrong?” She lays down next to him, taking a pillow and bundling it into her arms. “Were you too chivalrous?” It is meant to be a joke, the way her voice lilts into a teasing tone.   
  


Bill lays back as well. He looks at the ceiling, seeing Stan’s face when he’d said  _ I love you _ . “I don’t know about shuh-chivalrous, but m-maybe I was too honest?” He tries to think of something else he’d done, somewhere he’d put his hands, maybe, but they had gone much further than they had tonight without any complaints from Stan. So it had to have been the love, or the admission of it. Bill had always hoped that Stan could feel it coursing through his mind when they melded. He could never be sure exactly what he was sending out though, just like he couldn’t control what he received. When Stan had curled into himself and said  **No** it had felt like touching a livewire, he had tasted the hurt: a burnt, ashy taste. He’d felt the course of  _ despairlonginganger _ . It had shocked him so much that Bill had dropped the meld, their dreams ripped apart and ended.  What he wouldn’t give to go back, to withstand the pain and ask what it was he did, what he could do to fix it.   
  


He feels an arm drape across his chest and he flinches. “There you go again, William. Leaving me for your thoughts.” Beverly fits herself to his side, nose to his neck and presses the tiniest kiss there. “You remember what I said, when you told me it wasn’t a dream? When you told me you would remember this in the morning, and that if I needed you I only had to ask?”   
  


Bill laughs at the memory. “Yea-ah, you said ‘I’m too smart to dream up boys this nuh-nice’ and then you woke yourself up.” Beverly laughs too, but it peters out as they remember the events that followed. “I-I told you so soon, that it was real.” Bill says. He would never regret it. It had been in an effort to save Beverly, after all, but he didn’t understand what it meant, what it would feel like, when the other person was aware. He and Beverly do not meld anymore. Their shared dreams tend to be… chaotic at best.   
  


“I think,” she tilts her face up to his, “you did exactly the right thing, Bill. And…” She kisses him again, on the cheek this time, “that you will do the right thing with Stan too, and he’ll love you even more than I do.” She presses quick pecks to his face that have him laughing, “and that is whole lot, Denbrough. A whooole lot.” He pushes her away gently, tucking a piece of her fiery hair behind her ear. Sometimes he wonders why it was not her name written in his cosmos, wonders if she’ll meet someone that will love her the way she deserves.   
  


He must have stared too long, because Beverly tilts her head to the side and licks a long stripe up the side of his face, laughing loudly as he pushes her off the bed. She rolls up quickly, still laughing as she leaves his room. “Y-you’re di-disgusting, Marsh!” He calls after her, wiping his face clean. He cannot help but stare after her, his chest swelling with gratitude. It lasts for a brief moment. Then he remembers that Beverly thinks he has told Stan that it is real, that he’s real, when in reality he’s never even gotten close.   
  


When Bill melds their dreams he is usually enraptured by Stanley’s skin, his hair, the cadence of his voice.  He exists there, in the sunlight, on the bed, a slave to Stan’s emotions. They run through him, control him almost. When Stan thinks **touch me** Bill’s hands meet his thighs and when Stan’s heart aches for love there is almost nothing that can stop him from saying the words. Tonight had been… bad. Stan had felt like the ocean in him, waves of **loveme** , **touchme** , **pleasedon’tgo** , crashing through Bill’s mind.   
  


Sometimes Bill wants to press Stanley down and demand:  _ who did this to you? Who hurt you? I’ll give them nightmares,  _ he wants to promise,  _ they’ll be scared to sleep, they'll be scared to close their fucking eyes.  _ And he would. It is not anything he hasn’t done before. If he closes his eyes and reaches into himself he can still taste Alvin Marsh’s fear, like a warm quarter on his tongue, growing hotter the more he remembers. He can see the blood, real blood, that had crusted itself under Alvin’s fingernails where he’d scratched down his face.   
  


The memories do not help.  _ Hey Stan. I’m your soulmate, I’ve seen your eyes in the corners of my soul and touched the threads that tie our hearts together. I’ve been melding our dreams together for almost a year and if anyone so much as looks at you the wrong way I can drive them borderline insane and have them institutionalized. So…. wanna makeout?  _   
  


Bill shoves his face into a pillow and resists the urge to scream, but just barely. No. No, it is far too late to tell Stan now. They’ll find each other, because they’re soulmates, because the stars have planned for them to fall in love… because he is scared to imagine what will happen to Stanley if Bill cannot show him, really show him, what it is like to be loved. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so like... this obviously... got away from me... 
> 
>  
> 
> ((seriously though to everyone who commented I LOVE YOU and i'm very sorry i had y'all feeling some type of way))


	3. Interlude I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Touched on last chapter, part 1 of how Beverly and Bill became so close. 
> 
> Some important world building and character intro, so I wouldn't skip just because it has no stenbrough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> pls read the note at the end :)

On the first day of junior year Bill meets Beverly Marsh. She is dressed in loose jeans despite the new trend of tight constricting clothing, and though she has eyes that sparkle like the streams in the barrens on a summer day she is unremarkable, really. Bill knows this. Yet there is something about her that calls to him, even before they’ve spoken a word to one another. He has learned over the years that the intuition he has, if it can be called that, is not something to be ignored. So he smiles at her, and when she smiles back it’s like he can feel their threads tie together, tangle in air. He has to blink, to reground himself in the here and now. It is like that, sometimes. He doesn’t really understand it, but sometimes he goes somewhere else. A void of stars and planets and... energy.  


Threads of electricity, or… essence… or… Well. Bill isn’t too sure what resides in that celestial void, but he can feel his parents there, and his little brother, and… sometimes he can feel people he doesn’t want too, like Henry Bowers and Patrick Hockstetter. Somehow, he knows that he will wake up there again tonight, and he will be able to dip his fingers into the threads of Beverly Marsh. It’s scary. Daunting. He knows what happens when he touches the threads, knows what it’s like to be sucked away _into_ someone else like he doesn’t have a body. It’s not something he is eager to do again.   


When Bill sleeps that night his prediction comes true. It feels instant, like he’s closed his eyes in a blink and then he’s opened them to this: shooting stars and floorless space, floating past the connections that tether to his galaxy. His mother, pink and black and red and blue threads that braid together and loop through the air. Georgie, all yellows and greens flayed strings that float their frayed ends from a tight knot. And there she is: Beverly Marsh. They’re not labeled, of course, but he would be a fool to mistake her thread for someone else. It is a small, single pink braid, the length of Bill’s hand. It floats without a tether and Bill grabs it before he can tell himself that it is a bad idea.   


The feeling of leaving his own body is not painful, but it is not pleasant. Like he’s been on a ride for too long, like he’s falling and falling and falling until: he is in her dream. She is sitting in a tub, looking at a postcard. She is smiling. Bill wonders how she doesn’t feel his presence there, and as if he willed it to happen they meet eyes. She is startled, defensive. _What the fuck,_ she says, stuffing the postcard into her overall pocket and backing herself into the corner of the bath. Bill doesn’t really know what to say, doesn’t know why he’s here, why they’re connected.  So he doesn’t say anything. This is a dream, for her, and she will likely not remember it. She stands, squinting her eyes at him. _I know you,_ she says. _Why am I dreaming about you?_ That is said more to herself, but Bill shrugs anyway, playing it off. He can feel her confusion, and he tries to project the feeling of normalcy.   


There is the distant sound of something slamming, and Beverly’s eyes shoot to the door and widen in: _fearfearfearhopelessness_ she looks at him and the feelings soar, so harsh that Bill feels he may choke on them, that she’s filling the bathroom with oilslick terror and he’s going to drown--

So he pulls out. Wakes up. Gasps in the cold night air of his bedroom and starts to heave, loud noises that ratchet his shoulders and leave him breathless. His parents do not wake. Instead he works himself down thinking: _i’m real. This is real. Not dreaming. I’m safe._ But, he can still feel Beverly Marsh’s terror, sloping down his arms and glopping down his lungs to settle in his stomach, and sure Patrick had left him vomiting too, but not like this, never like this. This was something else inside him, binding their threads and melding their minds together without his consent. Something deeper than he’d ever felt before. It scares him.  


He wipes his tears and wonders why. Wonders if Beverly will remember him, skulking his way through her consciousness. He hopes not. _Never again,_ Bill thinks, resolute. Just like with Patrick and Henry and Georgie and his mom. One time. There is a feeling in his gut, though, that says he will not be able to live up to his inner promise.   


Beverly does not acknowledge him in school the next morning. Bill can feel her eyes linger on his face for a second too long, but they skirt away when he starts to turn. He does not approach her. The hum in him, the one that zings and soars sometimes, is quiet. He smiles to himself, thinking perhaps this is where it will end. That had been the case for the other two. Patrick had squinted at him for a moment, just a single second, as he raised his fist in the air and brought it down into the soft skin below Bill’s ribcage. Henry hadn’t even done that much. Blessings in disguise. If they had known he’d seen… Bill doubts he’d be alive now. That much is for sure.   


He shudders in his seat, unable to unsee the rusty handle of a fridge, the blood on Henry’s knuckles, the sound of a gun echoes in his head: once, twice--oh. Oh--he’s going away again. He can feel it--energy slipping out his fingers, world swirling into blacks and greys and blues and there it is: the milky way-- right where the door to the classroom had been--where still is. Bill tries to think of something to do, the threads of his peers cementing in the air, tangible now, and he sees for a second _something_ .  


In the corner of the room, where the trashcan was, a man? No, a… The thing spreads it’s limbs: black and white tentacle appendages that spread across the floor like spilt ink. It’s face is twisted in the halogen lights, mouth in a half snarl and eyes missing, pulled loose from their sockets, optic nerve dangling down over wrinkled skin. It moves towards him, in a motion that seems painful, unfurled arms dragging across the linoleum and passing through desks. The thing smiles, or it tries too, the skin around its mouth pulling back and _oh_ it has teeth--  but when Bill’s brain starts to catch up and react, when his hands break out into a cold sweat and his breaths start to stutter--it disappears. He blinks and it’s gone.   


Before Bill can stand and try to float over, to investigate or get away he isn’t quite sure, it is as if his next breath releases the rubber band around his lungs and he is back.   


Bill jolts up, his body convulsing at his desk, the breath wretched from him. The teacher says something, but Bill cannot hear it past the rush of blood in his ears. _What,_ he thinks, _what was that thing._ He does not see Beverly Marsh tilt her head at him, eyes deep in understanding, thinking of the nightmare she’d had the night before, of hearing her father’s footsteps in her dream and waking so violently that she’d toppled right off her bed and had woken Daddy too. He’d had an early shift this morning, and Beverly had been a bad girl to wake him up like that. A terrible daughter indeed, and she had the marks to prove it.   


So she stands, “I can take,” she pauses, wracks her brain for his name, comes up short. “Him to the nurse?” She looks at the teacher, a young woman who looks past caring, and tries to mold her face into nervous concern and bashfulness.   


The teacher nods, tells her to take the hall pass, and to wake another boy in the back, please. She gets to the still sleeping boy no problem, other students finally averting their eyes. He’s dirty. Literally, dirt is crusted on the back of his neck, visible past the too long blond hair that has swept to the side in his slumber. A hand stops her. She meets eyes with another boy she cannot name, and he grins at her, slow and… off somehow. “Don’t worry, sweetcheeks, I got ‘em.”   


Beverly looks at the front of the room again, but the teacher’s back is turned, and when she looks at the other boy, the one who actually needs her help, he is teetering on the edge of his chair. She nods. He smiles at her harder, eyes vacant and tongue wet where it licks the edge of his mouth.   


She is almost thankful another classmate is passing out, if only because she isn’t sure how long she could stand to be looked at like that. Like… a rat in lab. When she goes to help the sick boy stand he pulls away, only to sway into another desk. “Woah,” Beverly says, “Don’t die on me now.” She understands the flinch, she does that too, sometimes. Her hands are gentle on the splay of Bill’s back, cautious.   


They walk to the nurse in silence. Relatively, anyway, because Bill’s breaths are loud desperate sounding pants. She stops them a few times, asking if he needs to sit down, but he shakes his head and won’t meet her eyes. She assumes he is embarrassed, and drops him off without another word. It is what she would want. No questions. No pity. They didn’t do a lick of good anyway.  
  
Laying down in the nurse's office, after stuttering out something that might’ve made sense, might have been literally indecipherable, Bill can no longer fight the black spots at his vision. _Sleep,_ they say, _Don’t you want to sleep, Billy?_ He thinks of that thing, missing it’s eyes. No, he does not want to sleep. _Too bad_ , the voices say. _That’s just too damn bad._  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :) how ya'll doing. This offshoot would not leave me alone, and then it became a part of the real plot--which you can prob guess will be a little more complicated then Bill looking for Stanley ((and stans emo issues. love that boy but he dont love himself thats 4 sure)). 
> 
> if u wanna talk about where the plot is going or take some guesses then DO SO i'm still planning everything out so if you hated this tell me why and hopefully i can fix that next chapter!! 
> 
> I love all your comments, seriously, i read them when I feel bad or am having a bad day and!! they make me very happy .


	4. Important

Hey everyone! I'm sorry this isn't an actual chapter, but it's just a heads up that this current iteration of this story isn't going how I'd like it and I've decided I want to start over. I'm sorry if that's disappointing, but hopefully I can come back with something you will all still enjoy! 

I'll be leaving this up until the newer version is released, but as you can see I've marked it as complete. 

Once again I apologize! If you wanna ask about what I'm thinking for the new version, offer to beta(!), or literally you wanna bounce ideas for your own fics, then I'm on tumblr @pennysike, or you can ask for my email! 

Thank you all!!   
-Victoria.

**Author's Note:**

> Will I stop projecting my problems onto the It characters? No! probably not. 
> 
> pls comment i need the validation


End file.
